ISO Sensitivity / Noise levels (contd.)

In-camera High ISO noise reduction

The K200D offers four levels of High ISO noise reduction: Off, weakest, weak and strong. Looking at our samples it is quite clear that 'OFF' doesn't mean that there is not any noise reduction applied. The K200D's JPEG engine always applies some noise reduction and the level of High ISO noise reduction you choose comes on top of this. If you want images that are completely free of any noise-reduction, you'll have to shoot RAW.

The additional noise reduction attempts to address both chroma and luminance noise. It has no effect up to ISO 400 where the plots overlap each other almost exactly, before kicking-in at ISO 800 and 1600. The results, visible in the stamp crops below, show that High ISO noise reduction in its 'weakest' setting has indeed a very subtle effect, only adding a small amount of chroma noise reduction to the default parameters. The 'weak' and 'strong' settings are very similar and much more aggressive which results in visibly softer output and a loss of fine detail.

Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard
deviation of luminosity on the vertical axis.